Video settings

Pell struggles with compensation calculations

Cardinal George Pell says he is not in favour of financial caps on claims and struggled when he tried to suggest today's equivalent compensensation amount, speaking from Rome to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

The voice that has delivered a thousand sermons seemed unsuited to be that of a witness in the dock, even if it was a virtual dock. There seemed a defensiveness to it, and the jutting jaw left the viewer in a familiar, vain search for a gesture of humility.

Cardinal George Pell, of course, was in a complicated position.

He was in the eye of a camera in the Rome morning, speaking across an uncertain video link to a royal commission sitting through the late Melbourne afternoon, trying to explain his years-long and much criticised efforts to deal with a calamity within his church: the sexual abuse of hundreds of children at the hands of priests.

Cardinal George Pell. Photo: Arsineh Houspian

Here was a prince of the Church, good Lord, required to take a Bible in his hands and swear to tell nothing but the truth.

Advertisement

As counsel assisting the commission, Gail Furness, began the long process of peeling back the years of the so-called Melbourne Response to cases of abuse, the cardinal was a disembodied presence beamed jerkily on video screens around courtroom three of Melbourne's County Court. The Vatican had gone to no fuss. He sat before a drab curtain, as if he were in an old-time photo booth.

No hint of the gorgeous robes of a cardinal; Cardinal Pell wore a severe black suit and white shirt topped with a clerical collar. This was all business for the man who explained to the commission that his new job was "akin to being the treasurer to the Holy See". The keeper of the Vatican's treasure, the only outward sign of his power the solid gold cardinal's ring flashing as he adjusted his spectacles.

Arrayed within courtroom three for the grilling were not merely the royal commissioners, counsel assisting and eight of the 10 solicitors representing the Catholic church, but public rows packed with victims, their friends and their supporters. Their eyes were glued to the screens as if, finally, there might be answers to their years of bewilderment.

A woman's hands curled so tightly around the arm of her companion the knuckles shone white. Soon, exhausted, she buried her face in her neighbour's lap.

Forty five minutes in, the video link failed and the Cardinal was frozen on the screen, jaw jutting. "He's pulled the plug," a cynic cried. An adjournment was arranged, but it was merely the first of the technical failures to the inquiry across the heavens. Force majeure at work, perhaps.